The CSPA Quarterly is a publication meant to give a longer format and deeper space to explore and reflect the myriad ways in which sustainability in the arts is discussed, approached and practiced.
The publication features reviews, interviews, features, artist pages, essays, reflections and photos. It is a snapshot of a moment in time, a look at the many discussions in sustainability and the arts through the lens a particular theme.
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The Quarterly accepts open submissions for upcoming issues on a rolling basis. We also approach individual contributors for material and guest editorships that create a robust dialogue within a particular themed issue. Please email artist pages, reviews, process papers, conference reports, and essays to: editor@sustainablepractice.org.
YOUR SUBMISSION MUST BE RELEVANT TO SUSTAINABILITY AND THE ARTS. Do not send submissions about green technology, climate change, waste recycling, or any other topics if they are not directly relevant to the arts. There are a lot of other outlets for non-arts-related work. Good luck.
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(Online) ISSN 2475-7764 (Print) ISSN 2165-753X
BACK ISSUES AVAILABLE ON JSTOR
The CSPA Quarterly archive is listed on the digital library JSTOR! Past issues are archived here, as part of their Sustainability Collection. Individuals and institutions must have a JSTOR membership in order to access. Does not include issues for the current year. We're thrilled about this expanded access for the Quarterly.
For those with limited sight or difficulty reading, many articles from Q18, our "dis/sustain/ability" issue, edited by Bronwyn Preece, are available in an audio described and screen reader friendly format.
QUARTERLY 42: A MYRIAD OF HOMES
What constitutes a house? It is an assemblage of a multitude; of social connections, of environments, of feelings, not limited to property and privacy. In fact, most homes, also more than human ones, are ecosystems themselves. The diversity of their nature becomes more and more apparent as we try to extend our understanding of what can and what could constitute a home. This issue features several artistic practices alongside an essay and poetry that engage with gameplay in different ways. These artists and thinkers consider the act of play, and playfulness as a way of inhabiting and creating environments, communities, and ecosystems (which is to say different homes).
QUARTERLY ARCHIVE: Reprints, Reflections, Readings
This special issue of the CSPA Quarterly takes the form of an archive, which is to say it is an assemblage of past contributions that continue to feel particularly resonant. It is also an index of artistic and academic ideas, intended to create a resource with an expanded view of practice, noting artistic influences while leaving space to dream new possibilities. This document consists of reprinted articles and artworks from issues since the inception of the CSPA Quarterly, as well as reflective texts and a series of references in bibliographic form.
Q40: Compost and Other Rebirths
In a western world where religious “rebirth” is being used to justify the elimination of human rights, the idea of starting anew can be exhausting and suspect. Compost, as a process, reminds us that cycles are inherent in cultures, economies and bodies as well as ecologies. The artists in this issue engage with ideas of compost in ways that are important and enlivening, in Lead Editor Moe Beitiks' final issue for the Quarterly.
This issue explores borders as ‘a unique and specific place which is instrumental to the definition of globalization, integration, territorialization and reterritorialization’ (Nicol and Minghi 2005: 687) alongside the ecologies of landscape and community. It seeks to expand on geographies of (im)mobility and socio-spatiality through the reflections, processes and visions of artistic and community work that explore earth’s palimpsestic layers of those who have walked, planted, played, fought and fled.
Q38: Heal the Man, Heal the Land
Patricia Watts, founder and curator of ecoartspace, is editor of this issue, which includes essays on the mining of cobalt by Mary Mattingly and sculptural applications in wildlife rehabilitation by Rachel Frank, as well as a Post Anthropocentric art provocation by Linda Weintraub featuring the works of Amy Youngs, Dana Hemes, and Leah Wilson. Also included is an interview/conversation with Raphael Bengay and feature spreads of works by Dana Fritz, Bebonkwe / Jude Norris, and Lily Simonson with poet Katy Gurin.
How can we approach the non-human with authenticity? Resisting stereotype and symbolic simplification, can we instead move between the imperfect modalities available to us: the empirical gaze, new anthropomorphism, the intuitive, the speculative, poetic slippage, radical empathy? With multiple precipices occluding once familiar ground beneath our feet, we may find this threshold in an unexpected direction—and instead of stepping outwards, sink into a space below executive consciousness where we may gain entry to a more-than-human world by giving in to being something less than fully in control. Guest edited by Jenny Kendler.
We live in times that are impure — confusing and compromised — and this requires contingent thinking and acting. What happens when artists get involved in complex, difficult issues, where different parties are involved and there might not be such a clear-cut right and wrong? Or alternatively, when the costs of ambivalence may be impossibly high? This issue is framed around both/and: the role of complicity in social-ecological systems and how to maintain a contingent – yet effective – position as an artist and ecological participant. Guest edited by Perdita Phillips.
This issue of CSPA Quarterly destabilizes Colonial Settler perspectives in ecological art practices. By bringing together artists and writers who re-center BIPOC, and particularly Indigenous, voices in decolonial eco-art, this issue proposes a different way to view ecology. These artists each offer an incisive critique of a Western model of land-engagement, and its roots in ownership and exploitation.Guest Edited by Jonah Winn.
Bodies in Community explores how people move together: as an actual single body with its various markers in regards to a certain community or communities, as well as stories and notions of the self in community. Maintaining communities of color is an issue of sustainability. What is important to those bodies? What are communities after COVID? What are communities after this latest iteration of social unrest? How will we all relate to each other? How will trust be rebuilt? What are artists' bodies thinking about? Guest Edited by Mildred Beltre.
In "The Three Ecologies," Felix Guattari asked to "organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices regarding the formation of the unconscious." He continues: "It appears to me that this is the only possible way to get social and political practices back on their feet, working for humanity and not simply for a permanent reequilibration of the capitalist semiotic universe." This issue seeks to present examples of such practices and solidarities. It is particularly interested in imagining ways of bridging between what Guattari terms the "unconscious" and "humanity." Guest Editors Adelheid Mers and Daniel Jimenez Quiroz.
In this issue we explore Canada's National Arts Centre's Green Rooms project, culminating its cycle on Theatre and Climate Change. As part of its response to the escalating climate crisis, and in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, NAC English Theatre in partnership with Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), the Canada Council for the Arts, The City of Kingston, HowlRound Theatre Commons, National Theatre School of Canada and York University brought together participants for an extraordinary three-day/three-country digital experiment that reflected on the future of theatre. This issue highlights some of the artists and scholars who participated in the event. Guest edited by Chantal Bilodeau and Ian Garrett.
Body/World in movement, in touch and sense, in somatic play, technique, repetition and training, in relationship. We welcome full-mouthed messy matter and fleshy multispecies engagement across and beyond boundaries. The issue hopes to shape a complex tool-set for living in a changing natural world which impacts people differently, dependent on histories of violence and their attendant environmental effects. Guest Edited by Petra Kuppers.
Q30: ISSUE TAKEOVER: Lamentation
WEAD, Women Eco Artists Dialog, is a nonprofit focusing on women's unique perspectives and contributions in the eco and social justice art fields. Our global constituency numbers 400+/- activist feminist art workers (inclusive reading of art, feminism, woman, gender). WEAD's issue takeover Q30: LAMENTATIONS unearths GRIEF found in members' art and words. Facing oppressive loss of critical ecosystems, where is hope?
When words and sounds fail, silence has the potential to both open up space for listening, and serve as an oppressive force. This issue will examine Silence in various practices and processes, as both a facilitator of healing and a catalyst for trauma. Artists are silent, question silence, are empowered through and threatened by silence, listen in silence, stew in silence. This issue is a quiet one, but it is by no means without agency.
Guest edited by Fereshteh Toosi. Animating Ancestors is a special themed issue of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Quarterly journal which features projects that breathe life into the past. The word "animate" comes from the Latin verb animare meaning "giving life to." Ancestors are all the plants, animals, people, fungi, soil, water, that constitute our lineage on this planet. This issue includes contributors who bring these inherited realities alive for their audiences through their creative research.
Q27: ISSUE TAKEOVER: Legibility
An opening up of and gathering of discourse around the concept of legibility. Who and what can be read and defined? And how easily? What should be made visible and accessible, determinate, and what should remain in the registers of ambiguity and contingent understanding? Reaching for Jack Halberstam's use of the term legibility in "The Queer Art of Failure,"and placing it next to technology and the rendering of the climate as legible to better predict and understand its behavior, bodies and genders resist the legibility of being easily defined and determinate to governing bodies and power, while we are scrambling for more clear legibility of our environments, positioning the body in contention with the atmosphere it’s amidst. Contributions to the journal are suspended between these two ideas, questioning the foundations on which we perceive the legible, and who it benefits. ISSUE TAKEOVER by Calvin Rocchio.
Guest Edited by Clare Qualmann, this edition of Quarterly thinks through its feet. Or rather it thinks through a human pace. A self-propelled pace. Many artists note the creative role of the walk in connecting them to the natural world, in developing their senses and sensibility to ecologies and environments.Whether conceived of as situation, or live art event, performance or guided tour, the walk-as-art is a distinct thread within walking arts practice that holds particular potential for connecting people, place and politics – for activating interconnections and operating as ‘real world’ intervention whilst simultaneously forefronting the aesthetic considerations of their artist creators.
In an era marked by myriad crises (ecosystem collapse, political and social unrest, growing economic inequity), CSPAQ Issue 25: Time and Attention compiles various frameworks, tactics, and propositions for tuning our attention and contextualizing our place in time. An experimental philosopher, prisoners, a child, and others contribute their diverse perspectives, collectively and constructively building a discourse for how we might direct our time and attention. Guest Edited by Ryan Thompson.
Q24: ISSUE TAKEOVER: Lab for Aesthetics and Ecology
Our first-ever issue takeover! The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology takeover of the CSPA Quarterly proposes generative spaces of experiment and failure for a speculative, sustainable aesthetics. The issue grapples with the metaphors of compost and glutinous narratives. It paints with the eerily luminous colours of climate breakdown, and offers instructions for post-(r)evolutionary survival. It stays with the troubles of enlisting nonhumans as labourers of detraumatization, and presents cyborg witches as unholy guides towards reparative tactics for modest hope. Edited by Ida Bencke and Dea Antonson. Designed by Zille Bostinius.
This issue will look at the frameworks of artists working sustainably. It is a compilation of some outstanding artists' initiatives, projects, residencies and proposals, regarding the various structures of support (economic, academic, programmatic) and considering how artists work to interrogate, improve and intervene in those frameworks of support. Guest Edited by MK Meador.
Sustainability is often discussed in terms of maintenance, or awareness-- engagements with the known. This issue asks a series of artists for their work and reflections on the vast expanse beyond the known-- from questions of nothingness, to existential crises, to attempts to anticipate the unexpected. How are creative practices sustained in the face of uncertain funding futures, or vast cultural shifts? How do the arts aid sustainability when change is vast, immediate, and unknown? How can we be certain that what we sustain will be useful?
Guest Edited by WhiteFeather Hunter, the Material Futures issue unpacks productive "troubling" of the processes and materials that creative fields and practitioners engage with. This troubling is done via re-visitation or reclamation of traditional art/ craft/ design methodologies and topics, as well as innovating within critical materiality, #futurecraft or future-now initiatives. Circular design, carbon negative/ zero waste production, materials science and biomaterials, and disruptive technologies are research-creation-production foci that mean to shift away from trends in over-consumption and the unsustainable towards recuperative, remedial, regenerative paradigms and practices.
For this, our 20th issue, we take a moment to look back at the history of the quarterly, and examine our own self-care, while inviting contributions from artists and thinkers who address self-care in their process and practice. How do we sustain ourselves, when everything around us demands sustenance? Featuring contributions from John K.Grande, Perdita Phillips, Ernesto Pujol, Sarah Berkeley, and more.
Queer ecologies slither through the wanton matteriality of naturecultures, including the perversity of electrons, the polyamorous tendrils of lightning, the deep futurity of plastic, the trans-species animacies of xeno-estrogens, and the polymorphous fecundity of holobiontism, and on and on and on. O yes yes yes. This issue invites you to writhe in the queer resistances of anti-normativity, anti-futurity and anti-reproductivity, the queer possibilities of performativity, diversity and kinship, and the precarity, intimacy and adaptability of evolutionary theories of sexual, natural and social selection and phenotypic plasticity. It slides through sustainability and slips into compostability, sifting through the transient, the fecund, the toxic, the permanent, the deviant, the perverse and the selective to unearth the spacetimematter of proliferation, extinction and thennowwhen. Guest edited by Tarsh Bates.
This Quarterly issue offers a diverse array of artistic responses and critical means for interrogating the overlaps of sustainability and disability-- and the relevance of conjoining these concepts in/for today's world. Drawing on practitioners and scholars from three continents, some self-identifying as "disabled", others not, this issue grapples with the neologistic tensions, hurdles and gifts of our cultural, social, economic and environmental propensities towards and with notions of disability. With contributions from Petra Kuppers, Stephanie Heit, Dee Heddon, Sue Porter, Neil Marcus, Sandi Yi, Ray Jacobs and Bree Hadley. Guest Edited by Bronwyn Preece.
What sustains our senses? Exploring firsthand experiences of nature, methods of non-human communication and harassment, and ideas of "ecosexuality," this issue looks at sensory understandings of ecologies. With contributions from Annie Sprinkle, Dao Nguyen, The Plant Sex Consultancy, Pony Express, Sacha Kagan and more.
In recent years, scenographic practice and performance design have increasingly moved beyond the theatre towards greater forms of hybridity. Possibilities are expanding to use scenographic strategies as a way of engaging with the world beyond the theatre. Can these practices play a role in revealing ecological complexity? Guest editors Tanja Beer and Ian Garrett curate a fascinating issue based on current practices in the field.
A look at Timothy Morton's concept of "Hyperobjects"-- viscous, nonlocal, phased and interobjective "things"-- through the lens of multiple artist practices. How are artists engaging with ideas and places so complex, they cannot be understood from a single vantage point? With contributions from Carol Padberg, Jessica Santone, Bethany Taylor, Sarah Knudtson, Liz Ensz, Timothy Morton, and more.
What does it mean to be culturally vibrant in the face of an escalating climate? How do we adapt to the continually evolving present? What changes, what moves? What is alive? A re-examination of the fourth and final pillar of sustainability-- culture-- this issue looks more deeply at the way art, activism and administration shape our relationship to ecologies. With contributions from Jane Bennett, Ian Garrett, Anne-Marie Melster, Elizabeth Orr, Julie's Bicycle, Guy Eytan, and Andrew Yang.
Third of a four-part series on the pillars of sustainability. What is social equity? How do art and performance define and address it? Focus on questions of access, material, meaning and communication in communities both human and non-. With contributions from Theresa May, A.Laurie Palmer, Ross Stanton Jordan, Kristina Wong, Corinne Erni and Anne-Marie Melster. Please note: The EMOS symposium was founded by May and Larry K. Fried, not Jose Cruz Gonzalez.
Though the environment is necessarily a key theme in a Quarterly devoted to sustainability, in this issue we take a particularly sharp focus on it. In particular, we examine environment in scenography, performance, art and theater. Part two of a four-part series on the four pillars of sustainability.
While many of our issues have featured work that is ecologically and environmentally engaged, in this issue, we will take a look at economic models in our cultural spheres. We're particularly interested in new models & infrastructure, art work or performance staged in response to economy, and reflections on our current cultural state.
The tenth issue of the CSPA Quarterly is about renewing, refreshing, and rewinding. This issue contains content from contributors who were part of Issue #1, along with new perspectives. Contributors include Plantable (Megan Moe Beitiks, Bronwyn Preece, Lisa Woynarski), Linda Weintraub, Sam Goldblatt, Emily Theys with Dance Exchange, Olivia Cambell, and Thomas Rhodes, with featured artwork by Dianna Cohen.
Our issue on Science/Art features a preview of the CSPA Fusebox Festival study, writing from Sarah Moon and Alyce Santoro, a report from Moe Beitiks on the first annual Moscow Science Art Conference, and an excerpt from Lina Weintraub's new book. Through this issue, we explore the connection and complex relationship that exists between science and art.
Q8: International Issue: The Sea is Rising
Our third international issue focuses on projects that call attention to topics that extend well beyond national borders. With a focus on interdependence, and an abundance of contributions about water, ice, and sea rise, this issue addresses the space between national borders- our oceans. Featuring work from Moe Beitiks, Chantal Bilodeau, Eve Mosher, Michael Pinksy, Christopher Robbins, and Liz Ward.
Cultures around the world rely deeply on both local creativity and agricultural activity. Creative culture and agriculture are inextricably linked, and both are facing challenges as we globalize. This issue contains stories from public projects, visual installations, film, and theater, and examines local vegetable farming, cotton and rice paddy industries, and shrimpboating.
Q6: Making the Invisible Visible
In the sixth issue of the CSPA Quarterly, we asked for work that allows what is typically invisible to the human eye to be visible, tangible, and understandable. Work came to us from Silke Walther & Thomas Rappaport, Jane D. Marsching, Christopher McNulty, Marissa Prefer, and Norm Magnusson.
Our fifth issue of the CSPA Quarterly called for work related to International Initiatives. Contributors include ARTPORT, Arts in the One World, Forum for the Future, Moe Beitiks, Roberta Holden, JB Kyabaggue and Emily Mendelsohn, and Shinji Turner-Yamamoto.
The summer edition of the CSPA Quarterly. In this issue we look at issues of sustainability around digital artwork. With articles and work from Adobe Systems, Chi-wang Yang, Adam Frank and others.
In this issue, we're working against the stereotypes of the form, and attempting to broaden its term. As always, we're exploring our chosen theme across disciplines and were delighted to include sculpture, visual art, theater, public art, and media art in the following pages. Instead of asking for…
Issue on International eco-policy and its relationship to art and culture, featuring work from Copenhagen during the United Nation's conference on climate change in December, 2009. Contributors include: Jessica Broderick Lewis, Ian Garrett, Aviva Rahmani, Miranda Wright, David Berridge, Rachel Lois…
This edition of The Quarterly explores sustainable arts practices in performance, visual art & installation, green touring, and eco-policy. Articles include "Code Green: A Comparative Look at Worldwide Cultural Policies for Green Events," by Sam Goldblatt. This edition's featured artist is Dianna Cohen.
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